Phil Bernstein – Page 13 – Phil Bernstein's Advertising, Marketing, and Sales Training Blog

A Simple Sales-Boosting Hack for 2017: Be On Time

How often do you show up for meetings “a few minutes late”? Those “few minutes” are damaging your reputation and costing you money.

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Photo by fotofabrika/dpc

A while back in this space I listed three sales resolutions you could make to increase sales in the new year. Here’s one more sales resolution:

Be on time. Every time. Starting now.

I know, I know. You’re busy. You don’t mean to be late, but stuff comes up.

When you show up late, you raise a big question in your client’s mind. Brent Beshore of Forbes says,

Your punctuality says a lot about you… If you can’t keep your calendar, what other parts of your life are teetering on the edge of complete disaster?”

You’re clients are busy, too. Stuff comes up for them, too. When you show up late, you are telling them that your stuff is more important than their stuff.

You are also costing them money. As Beshore points out in Forbes:

Let’s consider a scenario where five people are holding a meeting at 2 p.m. Your sauntering in ten minutes late just wasted 40 minutes of other peoples’ time. Let’s say the organization bills $200/hour. Are you paying the $133 bill? Someone certainly is.

Make a habit of this, and you will pay the bill in lost opportunities.

Here are four steps you can take to drive lateness out of your life:

Stop trying to bend the laws of physics – don’t schedule by “wishful thinking”. If your first appointment’s at 8:00, the meeting is projected to take an hour, and there’s a 30-minute drive to the next call, you won’t get to the next one by 9:15.
If your client has multiple locations, double-check the address. Last year in California, we arrived 45 minutes late to a meeting with significant revenue potential because the client was at one of his clinics and we went to the other one across town.We did not get the revenue.
Download directions in advance. In the age of Google Maps, there is no excuse for getting lost on the way.
Build in time for “stuff happening.” There will be traffic. A meeting will run long. 30 minutes of unscheduled time in the middle of the day can save your afternoon.

A Special Note to Sales Managers

“I hate bringing my managers on calls,” a very successful television Account Executive confessed to me last year. “They’re great people, but they always make me late.”

His managers were overscheduled. Meetings back to back. Spreadsheets due at corporate by close of business. One more email to return… and then another one… and then another one.

Often, he told me, someone would buttonhole the manager on the way out of the office, causing a 10-minute hallway conversation… and a 10-minutes-late arrival at the customer’s office.

“I’ve learned to come up with an excuse for going in separate cars,” he said. “That way at least one of us will be on time.”

If this sounds like you — and it is a phenomenon I witness often on the road — what message are you delivering to your sellers?

Punctuality means respect, and respect will earn sales. The most effective salespeople, and sales managers, in any industry show up on time.

[reminder]What’s your best tip for keeping your day on track?[/reminder]

Copywriting Tip: Is There a Story?

I recently drank a $12 bottle of water. It was pretty good.

I learned of MaHaLo Hawaii Deep Sea Water in December during a tour of the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii (NELHA). MaHaLo uses one of NELHA’s pipes to draw the water out of the Pacific Ocean, and then runs it through a desalinization process.

Candee Ellsworth, the Executive Director of Friends of NELHA, told us that the water is marketed primarily in Japan, where it sells for 12 bucks a bottle.

What do you get for 12 bucks? From the MaHaLo website:

The Deep Sea Water used for MaHaLo bottled drinking water is very old. It takes between 1,200 and 2,000 years for the water to travel from the North Atlantic Ocean through the freezing Arctic currents, under the vast glaciers of Greenland, where it gathers ancient minerals that leach down from the ice.

Then it flows around and back down toward the deep channels of the Pacific Ocean. It is there, at the Water Rejuvenation Zone just off the coast of Kona, Hawaii, that the water is at its very purest. This is why Koyo USA placed its processing and bottling plants on the Kona coast of the Big Island of Hawaii…

MaHaLo Hawaii Deep Sea^® Water is drawn from 3,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. At this depth the water is very cold, about 43° F (6°C), and is safe from surface pollutants caused by industry, farming, chemicals or human waste.

Ellsworth poured us some of this precious water, and it tasted like… water. Good water, and a huge step up from Kona tap water… but water. Although the company has gotten into some trouble for its manufacturing process, Ellsworth told us that Mahalo sells every bottle it can manufacture.

Why do people pay $12 a bottle when there is much cheaper bottled water available? Because a host who serves Mahalo water can tell a story.

For similar reasons,

a collector in Greece paid $23,000 for a saltine cracker. It wasn’t just any saltine cracker — it came from the Titanic.
some people will pay $66 for a 35-gram package of coffee made from elephant poop. When it comes from an elephant’s butt, it ain’t just coffee.
I once ordered, and consumed, a plate of “Sauteed Ox Pennis” from a restaurant in Vietnam. It was spelled that way on the menu.

Copywriting Tip: Look For the Story

Seth Godin put it this way:

The story we tell ourselves is actually what is being sold. The challenge is not how to be successful, but how do we figure out how to matter. And the way we matter is by connecting people with a story. A story that resonates, a story they care about and a story they’ll tell other people.

When you are looking for a way to set a client apart from the competition, look for a story.

How was the business founded?
How is the product made?
Is there anything compellingly different that can capture the audience’s imagination?

A few years ago I met with the owner of a restaurant in Nevada. The food was good, and the family that ran the restaurant was very nice. I was struggling to find a hook until I asked the owner what dish meant the most to him. It was the quiche.

Why the quiche?

Because the family that owned the restaurant had a farm. With chickens. And every egg that went into the restaurant’s quiche came from the family chickens.

Sometimes the commercials write themselves. It did not take me long to write this one after I got back to the hotel. The ad ran for almost two years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaQUClnSYrI&feature=youtu.be

Consumers will go out of their way, and pay more, if they hear the right story.

Does your client have a story to tell?

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Coming very soon: a new networking site for television/digital sales professionals. Be looking for information about TV Sales Cafe™ later this month!

Pipeline Math: How Many Active Prospects Do You Need?

Are you overestimating the value of your sales pipeline? It may not be as full as you think.

Sales skills: calculate your pipeline the right way — Photo by olly/dpc

“The ball don’t lie.” – former NBA great Rasheed Wallace

Sales Pipeline Math: A Story Problem

This comes from Jeb Blount’s new book Fanatical Prospecting:

Becky has 30 prospects in her pipeline. Her closing percentage is 10%. She closes one deal. How many prospects remain in her pipe?

At first glance, the answer seems easy – she had 30, remove one, now she’s got 29? Right?

Wrong.

As Blount points out, the real answer is 20.

Here’s the math. Becky has a 1 in 10 probability of closing a deal. That means on average she will close only one deal out of 10 prospects she puts in her pipeline. The net result is when she closes one deal, the other nine are no longer viable prospects. This means her pipeline will be reduced by 10 prospects rather than one. She must now replace those 10 prospects to keep her pipeline full.

This is why when you get on a hot streak and close a bunch of business in a month, you wake up the following month with nobody left to close. Your prospect pool has suddenly evaporated, and you wonder where everybody went.

[shareable]The ball doesn’t lie in basketball, and the math doesn’t lie in sales.[/shareable]

Closing a sale creates new responsibilities: credit apps, production forms, creative meetings, collections. It is easy, when you are busy, to put off prospecting. You take a look at your pipeline, figure you’ve got plenty left, and stop making new business calls.

Here’s the problem: making a sale doesn’t just take one prospect out of the pipeline. It takes that one, multiplied by the number of active prospects you need, on average, to close one sale.

The next time you have a quiet moment, do some calculating.

How many proposals does it take, on average, to close a sale?
How many proposals do you have under active consideration right now?
How many prospects will each sale take out of the pipe?

The ball doesn’t lie in basketball, and the math won’t lie on your prospect list. Run the numbers, and then get on the phone.

[reminder]What’s the biggest struggle you have in keeping your sales pipeline full?[/reminder]

Don’t Sell Prevention — Sell the Cure

“Why isn’t the service contract campaign working?”

sell the cure, not prevention — Photo by Syda Productions/dpc

The question came from a television station Account Executive in the Southeast. He was working with an HVAC contractor who wanted to promote maintenance service agreements. The commercial had been running for about three months and had generated very few calls.

I’ve met with more than a few heating and air dealers and auto repair shops who have done very well with service plans — they are a terrific source of predictable, ongoing revenue.

But the most successful ones have told me that the general public isn’t particularly interested in a service agreement. The best source of leads for such plans are existing repair customers.

Why?

Perry Marshall, author of 80/20 Sales & Marketing, explains it this way:

People don’t buy prevention, they buy a cure for their existing problem. If you want to sell it, it’s much easier to sell it as part of a cure than trying to convince someone who’s never had the problem in the first place.”

This applies many categories:

When are we most likely to sign up for automated computer backup? Right after our computer crashes.
Many of us don’t make the effort to exercise or eat right… but we’ll pay for the gym membership or diet plan to get rid of the weight we gained through poor nutrition and inactivity.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans will not bother to get a flu shot… but they’ll head right to the doctor and demand antibiotics once they get sick.

As we strategized about the heating-and-air campaign, I gave the Account Executive some advice that a very smart HVAC guy once gave me:

The best time to sell a service contract is when we’re in the customer’s home, working on their broken air conditioner.”

The best way to generate more service agreements? Go after emergency repair customers. That’s the advertising target.

Sell the cure.

Copywriting Tip: The Advertiser is Not the Hero of the Story

When you sit down to write an ad, you have a chance to tell a story. Who is the hero of the story? It’s not the advertiser.

radio and tv advertising: the customer's customer is the hero of the story — photo by likstudio/dpc

In his e-book How to Tell a Story, Donald Miller lays out a very effective structure for a marketing piece:

A character [the hero] as a problem, then meets a guide who gives them a plan and calls them to action.

That action, Miller explains, either results in a happy ending or a sad ending. For example:

In the movie Star Wars, Luke Skywalker wants to fight against the evil empire, but he also wants to know if he has what it takes to be a Jedi. He meets a guide named Yoda who gives him confidence, a plan, and training to go out and defeat the enemy. The happy ending happens when Luke destroys the Death Star and preserves the Rebellion to fight another day.

In the stories you are constructing for your clients, the advertiser is not the hero – the advertiser is the guide. The advertiser’s customer is the hero.

A man wants to buy a car but has lousy credit. He meets a guide – your car dealership client – who helps him get a car loan at an affordable rate and payment, and and puts him on the path to rebuilding his credit. The happy ending occurs when his new car pulls into his driveway.
A couple is frustrated that their home is too hot in the summer, it’s drafty in the winter, and their energy bills are too high. They meet a guide – your window dealer client – who shows them how new triple-pane windows will make their home more comfortable and bring their energy bills down.
A woman looks in the mirror and doesn’t like what she sees. She meets a guide – your aesthetic medicine client – who shows her how the clinic’s whizbang laser will make her look 10 years younger with no surgery, scars, or downtime.

A way to get started: begin your first draft by writing the words “This is a story about…”

Then answer the following questions:

Who is the hero? Write a brief description of your advertiser’s target customer.
What problem is the hero experiencing that your client – and the guide – can help solve?
What’s the plan – what product or service will the advertiser offer to solve the problem?
What is the happy ending that this plan will produce?

Now you’ve got an infrastructure to design your campaign.

One other note to keep in mind: when you are marketing yourself and your medium to potential advertisers, you also have a story to tell.

You are not the hero of the story – you are the guide.

[reminder]What’s the best story you’ve written for an advertiser?[/reminder]